Paradise Reclaimed

Besieged by climate change, Marshall Islanders are making their way to America’s heartland.

by

Kejmen Christine Alfred had another journey to make. The twenty-one-year-old had already come to the small city of Dubuque, Iowa, from her home in the Marshall Islands, the tiny Pacific island nation as far from Hawaii as Hawaii is from the U.S. mainland.

This new trip would be considerably shorter, but it dredged up the same anxieties. Alfred drove from her neighborhood in the diverse, low-income “flats” of Dubuque, down on the Mississippi River’s edge, up into the overwhelmingly white, mansion-studded bluffs that overlook the dramatic gorge separating Iowa from two other states.

On the other side of the bluffs, she walked into the far end of a low-slung strip mall and to the local Social Security Administration office. She had just been married, wanted to change her last name, and needed a new Social Security card to confirm her married status so she could enroll in college courses.

She was told that her paperwork was incomplete. Her application was denied.

Alfred told her mother, Irene Ernest, a leader among the small community of Marshall Islanders who have made their home in Dubuque over the last two decades. After several exchanges with the Social Security office, Ernest called Taj Suleyman, the equity outreach coordinator at the city’s human rights department. He agreed to escort Alfred on her next visit himself. She was granted her new card.

“A lot of time, the staff are unaware of the [Marshallese immigration] status, so they turn them away,” Suleyman tells me, adding that other similar cases with the office remain unresolved. Even if they are rubber-stamped by Social Security, he says, getting organizations and employers to accept Marshallese paperwork is another hurdle. “They’re not familiar with the different IDs or different documentation,” he says, so they decline to hire.

Marshall Islanders are dark-skinned, generally poor, and often don’t speak English. Especially during a time of stoked anti-immigrant sentiment, some might assume they are here illegally.

But in fact, this small population is in the United States on an open invitation from the federal government. Their unusual immigration status was extended as reparations for the damage to their nation’s ecosystem and public health wrought by U.S. nuclear tests on the islands. Between 1946 and 1958, the U.S. military conducted tests there equivalent to dropping 7,200 Hiroshima-sized bombs.

This small population is in the United States on an open invitation from the federal government.

Marshall Islanders have since moved to the United States by the thousands, most to white areas of the country, including Arkansas and Oklahoma, though a sizable community manages to get by in expensive Hawaii. Many more continue to make this move as rising waters caused by climate change pound the country’s twenty-nine coral atolls, washing their homes and even whole cemeteries out to sea.

Now Dubuque finds itself home to a fast-growing Marshallese community, an interesting distinction for a city still haunted by its reputation as “The Selma of the North.”

Two years ago, Art Roche, on his way to retirement as director of planning at Dubuque’s Mercy Medical Center, was looking for a way to fulfill the nonprofit hospital’s obligations to provide community outreach. After various meetings he learned that as many as half the area’s Marshallese adults were living with diabetes.

“We concluded that they were in a world of hurt,” Roche tells me. “And that this should be our number-one priority.”

Roche helped launch the Marshall Islands Health Project, now the Dubuque Pacific Islander Health Project, a department within the low-income-serving Crescent Community Health Center in Dubuque. He tapped Irene Ernest, whose command of English and outgoing cheeriness make her a natural liaison, to join the project as a community health worker.

“Not the cream-of-the-crop neighborhood down here,” Special Projects Coordinator Ann Morris, a white woman, tells me as we tour the Crescent offices, located in the flats near the river, in a renovated casket factory that also houses subsidized apartments. “Because we’re federally funded, we have to be located in a high-risk neighborhood.”

Crescent’s building is beautifully refurbished, with wood floors and detailing that preserves its industrial-age history—a patina that’s evident throughout the whole city. The meeting table in Ernest’s office, which she shares with two others, is set with traditional Marshallese crafts—a mat and vase of delicate “flowers” woven from plantain leaves—and a small dish of sugar-free candies.

Ernest, a short woman with a warm smile, explains that she moved here nearly a decade ago to seek treatment for her husband’s severe diabetes.

“After the nuclear bomb that they tested on our island, we lost our healthy diet,” Ernest says. Radiation poisoning affected vegetation and fish, and now, the inundation of saltwater from climate-swollen tidal waves is killing off most types of island trees except the coconut, which doesn’t mind saltwater. Islanders now subsist on a rice and flour-heavy diet, which explains the rate of diabetes.

But food isn’t the only thing claimed by the tides. The airport on Majuro, the nation's capital, has been repeatedly shut down as the sea laps away at the tarmac.

One beach, where Ernest remembers daily gatherings for barbecue and relaxation, is now gone. “My husband’s [family] house was on the oceanside,” Ernest says. “We lost our seawalls. We all helped each other build it. Now we lost it. So we need to send money back home so that they can buy cement.”

Stanley Samson, the pastor at the Dubuque Paradise Church, one of four Marshallese congregations in the city, has heard many such stories. “It’s not something that they want to talk about,” he says. “It’s something that’s in the hands of God. We pray about it every day.”

Samson, who is Ernest’s second cousin and serves as another quasi-spokesperson for the community, moved to Dubuque in the mid-1990s after two years in the established Marshallese community in Enid, Oklahoma. He calls the people of Dubuque “very nice,” and notes that they are good neighbors.

But Ernest says they still face many barriers to obtaining services.

Marshall Islanders’ special immigration status, established under the Compact of Free Association Act of 1985, allows them to live and work in the United States indefinitely, but they remain excluded from social safety net programs like Medicaid, food stamps, and government cash assistance.

In addition to the prevalence of diabetes, 44 percent of Marshall Islanders in Dubuque are unemployed. Nationally, Marshallese people have higher-than-average rates of limited English proficiency, and face more problems obtaining housing than other racial groups. Along with Samoan Americans, they are less likely to hold a bachelor’s degree than any other racial group.

Marshall Islanders’ special immigration status allows them to live and work in the United States but they remain excluded from social programs like Medicaid and food stamps.

In town, people sometimes stare, Ernest says, especially at Marshallese women, who are known to wear flip-flops and brightly colored traditional dresses in the dead of the Midwestern winter.

“Some people swear at us,” Ernest says. “Because ‘you’re so crazy!’ ”

There are other clashes. Marshall Islands culture is communal, and families often raise children collectively across households. They may share homes and cars and even cell phones among extended relatives, which can sometimes make it tricky to quickly track someone down.

And Marshall Islanders can “have a more fluid understanding of time,” says Sarah Gieseke, executive director of Dubuque’s Presentation Lantern Center, which provides language instruction to immigrants. Only a few make it to lesson appointments consistently, she adds.

The federal I-94 form given to Marshall Islanders when they make the requisite stopover in Hawaii before coming to the U.S. mainland is crucial for applying to jobs and accessing other services. But the thin cards are filled out by each individual personally, seem unofficial, and are easily lost.

“They clip it to your passport, and if it falls off, you think, ‘Oh, it’s a just piece of paper,’ ” says Ernest. “It happened to me once and it laid around in my house on the floor.”

And then there are the continued run-ins with agencies like the Social Security Administration, and rent-gouging landlords who take advantage of new arrivals.

The city can only estimate that it’s home to between 300 and 600 Marshallese. About 300 black people lived here in the late 1980s, when the cross burnings began.

Iowa has a checkered past interacting with black Americans and immigrants—anyone who could be categorized, broadly, as “the other.” While slavery was never legal in the state and it was one of the first to grant black men the right to vote, nonwhites were still often subject to overt discrimination.

In 1844, as the state drafted its constitution, Edward Langworthy, who served in the territorial legislature, barring black people from Iowa. They were, “upon the borders of a slave state,” he said, “and if we had not something to keep them out, we should have all the broken-down Negroes of Missouri overrunning us.”

Even against this backdrop, says Iowa State University professor Katy Swalwell, “Dubuque in particular has, even from its earliest days, a pretty ugly, capital-R racist past.” In 1840, a black founding father of the city, Nat Morgan, was beaten to death by white residents who claimed he had stolen a trunk of clothes. That incident deterred many black people from moving to the area, but there were other dynamics at play too.

Over time, as black populations grew in Iowa’s other urban centers like Des Moines and Waterloo, Dubuque remained lily white. Rural Iowa, where there were fewer jobs and it was most often illegal for black families to purchase farmland, stayed white too. But black people could find work in river towns, where the ports offered dock jobs.

“If there’s going to be a large black population in the state, it’s going to be either in a city or a river town,” Swalwell explains. Dubuque was both, but the black community there remained conspicuously small. Even in 1989, when Dubuque had more than 300 black residents, police found a burned cross with “KKK Lives” written on it among the ruins of a garage owned by a black leader in the local NAACP chapter.

In response, Dubuque implemented a program to attract 100 black families to the city. A horrifying backlash ensued, resulting in multiple cross burnings across town, racial fights at schools, and white supremacist graffiti. The city recorded fourteen burning crosses through 1993.

More recently, Iowa lawmakers have sought to bar Syrian refugees from entering their state. In 2015, Iowa’s Republican Governor Terry Branstad joined eighteen other governors across the country to forcefully proclaim that they would not allow in Syrians—staking out a steadfast anti-immigrant stance.

That same year, a nineteen-year-old Marshallese man, Helman Betwell, admitted to sexually assaulting and killing a woman because there was “nothing better to do.”

“That put fear in both the mainstream community and the Marshallese community,” says Suleyman of the city’s human rights office. “They felt it would [cause] backlash. There was a level of misunderstanding and a stereotype about the community.”

Then, in April 2016, two more crosses burned, in the poor part of town where a lot of immigrants and black residents live today, four blocks from Dubuque Paradise Church.

“Did I tell you about ‘Marshallese Time’?” Irene Ernest calls out as I descend into the church basement one recent Sunday, where she’s preparing a special feast in the kitchen. Service was supposed to start at 11 a.m., she tells me, but it’s been pushed off until 1 p.m.

Today’s event is a big fundraiser to buy the church building. The kitchen is overflowing with food, including breadfruit and fish shipped straight from the islands. Irene rolls mashed banana into balls, and coats them in coconut, a traditional treat.

“Back home we use fresh coconut,” she says, pointing to plastic bags of the preshredded version. “But here we have this.”

Around 2:30 p.m., the service is still a half-hour off, but the music has started. It’s beautiful, played live on keyboard and guitar by a few young men up at the altar, so loud it shakes the pews.

Across the street from the church, signs indicate that the area is part of the Bee Branch Watershed. Through the middle of the flats, between the towering bluffs and the Mississippi, runs the Bee Branch Creek, which drains into the river. As climate change drives heavier rains in Iowa, places like these are especially apt to flood. Indeed, it has flooded enough since 1999 to warrant six presidential disaster declarations.

“When it rains,” the city of Dubuque explains on its website, “the Bee Branch Creek fills up with water similar to how a bathtub fills up with water.”

The Marshallese living here, in other words, have escaped one climate crisis only to land squarely in the middle of another. For its part, the city has been proactive about addressing the threat, implementing a $219 million flood mitigation plan.

In the meanwhile, more Marshallese are on the way. “People keep coming,” Ernest says. “Nonstop.” Even from other parts of the United States.

Oprah Eknar, a twenty-one-year-old Marshallese American, just moved to Dubuque from the largest mainland community of Marshall Islanders in Arkansas, where she was born and raised. The community in Dubuque, she says, is “not as well developed.”

In Arkansas, Eknar says, “there’s plenty of opportunities for Marshallese people. We have nurses there that are Marshallese, we have police officers that are Marshallese, we have teachers, we have people who work at medical centers. Plenty of people in good positions there.”

But, she adds, “Arkansas was also a white state so, it’s all the same.”

Suleyman candidly admits that Dubuque is not really ready for new arrivals, despite advances like the Dubuque Pacific Islander Health Project.

“I don’t think they’re prepared,” he says. “They don’t know what to do with the community that are over here. Preparedness for people who are coming here? No, I don’t think so.”

Back at the church, the music plays throughout the service, which lasts for hours. Though Ernest warns me that the non-English-speaking Marshallese may be too shy to approach, I receive multiple handshakes and smile-and-waves as I take a seat near the back.

The Dubuque Paradise Church has seen better days. There are water stains on the ceiling, and the frayed edges of the ragged carpet stick up at the seams. The red metal front door sometimes gets stuck closed.

But as I sit there, the afternoon sun fills the chapel with a golden stained-glass glow. Transcendent strains wring joyous cries from the congregation, while mothers with flowers in their hair pass sleeping babies from pew to pew between them. It’s easy to understand why they want to buy the building outright.

It may not be the American dream, but in a way, it’s their own reclaimed piece of a homeland paradise lost. For now.

Alexandra Tempus is associate editor of e Progressive.